Chapter 7: continued

UserLand Menu

The UserLand menu is the first of several customizable menus in the Frontier environment. It is shown in Figure 7-4. It includes a number of menu options you'll find essential as you write UserTalk scripts.

Figure 7-4. UserLand Menu

The first selection displays a word processing text document that explains the menu and some of its more important items.

The next selection creates a backup copy of Frontier.Root in the folder from which you launched Frontier. The backups are serialized (e.g. Frontier.Root.361, Frontier.Root.362), so as you work, you leave a trail behind you. Check out the backups folder in the folder you run Frontier from to see the trail of files. Backing up is important, and this command makes it simple to do. Just press Command-B to be sure your changes are safe. This menu option calls the script backups.backuproot, which you can examine with Command-J.

The third selection opens Frontier's menubar editor (see Figure 7-5). This tool lets you customize any of Frontier's special menus, including adding your own menu items, renaming or reordering those that are provided by Frontier, deleting menu items, or changing the behavior of menu items.

Figure 7-5. Frontier's Menubar Editor

The menubar editor organizes menus as an outline, with the item markers (triangle-shaped objects) on the left side of the window indicating whether a menu item has unexpanded sub-headings (if it is black) or not (if it is gray). If a menu item has sub-headings, that means it appears in the menu as a hierarchical menu with a triangle to its right side. Pressing and holding the mouse on a hierarchical menu item results in the display of additional options to the right of the item selected (see Figure 7-6).

Figure 7-6. Sample Hierarchical Menu

Figure 7-7 shows the same hierarchical menu in the menubar editor. Notice that the three sub-menus from Figure 7-6 are sub-headings in the outline of Figure 7-7.

Figure 7-7. Partial Menubar Editor Showing Hierarchical Menu

In the Frontier menubar editor, you can not only edit the names of menu items and the scripts attached to them, you can also assign or change the Command key associated with a menu item. Just press the mouse down on the popup menu in the lower left corner of the window (see Figure 7-8) and choose Set Command Key... to change the current setting or add a Command-key equivalent to a menu item that does not presently have one assigned.

Figure 7-8. Popup for Command Key Assignment in Menubar Editor

If you choose the first option, Frontier asks (see Figure 7-9) which Command key you wish to assign to the selected menu item. To remove a Command-key assignment, press Backspace (the delete key) in the dialog.

Figure 7-9. Command-Key Input Dialog

Frontier looks for Command-key equivalents from right to left on the menubar and from top to bottom within a menu. If you assign the same Command key twice on a menu, Frontier will find the first occurrence of the Command key each time it is used. Assigning duplicate Command keys is not generally recommended, though some suites do so.

Before we move on, you might want to take this opportunity to close a few windows so it's easier to focus on the new items.

Object Database, or Command-T, (for Table) opens the top level window of Frontier's Object Database (see Figure 7-10), a hierarchy of tables, numbers, strings, outlines, scripts and lots of other types of data. These values can be created by UserTalk scripts, by scriptable applications communicating with Frontier, or by the user interactively browsing the object database. See Chapter 6 for details.

Figure 7-10. Top-Level Window of Frontier Object Database